Gears & Code

Gears & Code puts students inside a twelve-week robotics apprenticeship. They begin by learning to see the automated world as systems with inputs, processes, outputs, and feedback, then get their hands on structural kits, shafts, and gears to build power-transmitting mechanisms and reason quantitatively about speed and torque trade-offs.

Programming enters the moment machines start moving. Students wire motors safely, drive a four-wheeled chassis with sequenced block code, and graduate to event-driven programs that react to bumpers, light sensors, and switches using loops and conditional logic. Along the way they adopt professional habits: flowcharting before coding, commenting as they go, testing incrementally, and debugging hardware and software as a single system.

The final unit is a team engineering sprint. Crews scope an automation problem that helps a person with limited mobility or strength, log test data across iterations, write build documentation another team could follow, and demonstrate their machine live with an evidence-backed engineering story.